M&G Investments and Schroders are among the asset managers bidding to run Britain's proposed £1 billion Scale Up Fund, Sky News reported on Wednesday, as the consortium of pension providers behind the vehicle moves from announcement to execution. A number of other firms, including specialist early s

For UK founders and investors watching which model wins the tokenisation infrastructure race, this week's confirmation from one of the world's largest custodian banks is a bigger signal than another platform launch.

QuantumLight, the venture firm founded by Revolut chief executive Nik Storonsky, has closed 500 million dollars for its second fund, doubling the size of the 250 million dollar debut vehicle it closed just over a year ago. Sifted reported the close on 18 August, citing people familiar with the deal.

US based venture firm Accel has raised 800 million dollars for its ninth early stage Europe and Israel fund, alongside a further 2.7 billion dollars across three other funds, the firm confirmed on 12 August.

A team of investors who left Phoenix Court, the London firm widely known by the name of its seed stage fund LocalGlobe, are in early talks to raise a fund of their own, Sifted reported on 12 August, citing sources close to the discussions.

For a founder building outside London, the hardest part of raising is rarely the pitch. It is getting in front of the right person at all. Warm introductions cluster around a handful of postcodes, and the funds with cheques to write are disproportionately based in the capital. A new £100 million com

Three operators are now live, a handful of household name private companies have run their first trading events, and the regulatory sandbox has five years left to run. On paper, PISCES looks like a UK reform that is working. Look at what the lawyers advising the companies actually running these even

Private company shareholders in the UK have a new, concrete answer to the question of when they can actually sell, and the first company to test it is not a startup at all, which is exactly why founders should pay attention.

Ten of Europe's largest financial institutions switched on a shared blockchain network for regulated markets on 28 July, and a UK bank is already circling the door.

For founders trying to read the mood of the market this year, the number to watch is not a valuation. It is how much dry powder the funds backing them are sitting on. Index Ventures has just given the clearest signal yet that the answer, at least at the top of the market, is a great deal more than a

Ask a UK founder why the biggest cheques in a later funding round tend to come from Boston or San Francisco rather than London, and the honest answer usually comes back to where the money sits. A proposal now on the table from two of Britain's largest pension providers is aimed directly at that prob

For a scaling UK company whose staff and early investors are sitting on vested shares, the historic answer to when can I actually sell has too often been simple: nowhere, until an IPO or an acquisition years down the line arrives, if it ever does. Monzo is the example founders point to most often, a

Ask a UK founder why the biggest cheques in their round come from Boston or San Francisco rather than London, and the honest answer usually traces back to where the money sits, not who is willing to write it. Startup Coalition, the industry body representing UK founders and scaleups, published an an

The British Business Bank has published annual results showing statutory pre tax profit of 426 million pounds for 2025 to 2026, nearly triple the 144 million pounds it reported the year before, alongside a record 9.4 billion pounds of finance supported for smaller UK businesses over the same period.

For UK founders weighing how to reward long serving staff without forcing a sale or an IPO, Moneybox has just supplied a fresh data point, and a useful one, because it is the first British fintech to put real numbers behind the answer.

Haatch Ventures has closed its fourteenth Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme fund after hitting its £4.5 million hard cap, the pre-seed B2B SaaS investor told backers on 11 July, two days after flagging that only £500,000 of headroom remained in a raise it runs partly through Crowdcube.

Structured products are a mainstay of Asian wealth portfolios, and HSBC is one of the region's largest issuers of them. That makes the efficiency case unusually strong. Popular products such as autocallables and equity linked notes have busy lifecycles, with observation dates, coupon triggers and early redemption events that are currently tracked and reconciled separately by the issuer, paying agents and distributors. A digitally native note makes the token itself the single

A plain English guide for founders and investors. Part of our intelligence series on equity tokenisation in the UK.

A founder in Britain in 2026 can do almost everything right and still end up in someone else's market. She can spin tech out of a UK university, raise a seed round from UK angels, hire her first team in Leeds or Bristol or Oxford, and prove that the thing works. She can scale the business to unprecedented heights - well almost - and then! At the precise moment the company is ready to grow into something durable, she will find that the money to do that is not here. It is

Picture two founders raising a seed round in the same week. One has built and sold a company before, has a network of investors who already know the name, and has funds competing to lead. The other has an equally good product, early revenue and a sharper insight, but no track record and no warm rout